As the nation goes into election gear, the political parties will engage more ferociously into playing identity politics. In the four years, the country has seen a slide into chaotic mess over divisive politics. The flames of religious hatred have been fanned and the people are consumed by the fires of ethnic pride. Political tribalism has come to stay not just in India but in many countries around the world.
There have have numerous incidents where minorities, especialy Muslims and Christians, have been attacked and their places of worship have been destroyed. The rise of what is called Hindu nationalism has resulted in instilling fear into the small groups of religious or ethnic communities so much that the nation’s social fabric lies tattered. Unfortunately, this phenomenon of “political tribalism” has cost India dearly and the image of a secular country has been damaged.
Group identities are dangerous to the national spirit. They are sectarian, religious or regional, everything else but national. Majoritism has no place in the modern concept of nation-state. All groups make of a nation with the markers of any hideous kind. It happens even in developed or economically giant countries such as America, Canada, Germany and UK, just to mention but a few.
With the rise of the BJP at the helm of power at the centre, the virulent groups associated with the party have come to the fore. The official patronage enjoyed by these groups have given them the power and scope to rampage and kill members of other groups on the slightest of chances. Watching TV images and reading about those who were lynched for beef-eating or cow slaughter disturbs the mind and heart. To know that these militant groups will kill or die for the sake of their religious beliefs or for their groups is frightening. Indian society is so much polarized that it would take fifty years to heal the wounds of these four years.
The coming of Narendra Modi in India and the election of Donald Trump in US has shown that populism pays. Modi and his party appealed hard to the Hindus and portrayed other minorities as non-important. In the same token, Trump pumped up the white American pride and showed that he cares less for minorities. Modi and Trump would best be reminded of what former US President George W. Bush said, “Freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred.” India has sunk into deep cycle of racial violence and it’s unlikely it will recover for a long time.
The sectarian divides are too wide that it would need a good government and goodwill of the people towards each other communities to narrow the gap.
Prevailing Hindu fundamentalism will further segregate the communities and if the BJP returns to power again in 2019, India will sink further into ethnic conflict and violence.
There’s frustration at many levels in many countries where democracy is under siege. Groups have been formed and movements set into motion by the poor sections of the people to take back the power from the political elites. Just as the BJP encourages Hindu dominance, the US is now facing the might of the Christian Right. In India, the working class of Hindus fell for the BJP’s gimmick, as much as the America’s working class voted for Trump. While Modi used his “chaiwala” dictum, meaning his economically lower-class identity, Trump said that he would help the lower-class white Americans and make “America great again.” Unfortunately, the lower-income US citizens bought into Trump’s slogan and failed to see that Trump didn’t belong to the same class as them. Modi is a product of the RSS, as much as Trump is a “supermacist.”
The coming parliamentary election will see a clash of ideologies. The BJP may try hard to mend its ways and try to be more appealing to the non-Hindu groups with lots of promises. Similar promises done before the 2015 elections are left unfullfilled. The Congress will bring its own slate of promises, and also indulge in winning the non-Hindu votes by castigating “Hindu terror” and sticking to its secular image. True, the UPA government was marked by many scandals and it gave the BJP the armanent to provoke the people against the Congress. Besides, it helped to polarize the electorate on religious lines and provide the lame excuse that Hindus were under threat in their own country.
It would be good to recall the Goan ex-police commissioner of Mumbai and former Indian Ambassador to Romania, Julio Ribeiro’s, anguish on the deterioriting scene in India. He says he’s much pained to see what’s happening to the country and that Modi is trapped in a political cage made of the BJP’s offshoots, such as the RSS and the VHP. He feels that as a Indian Christian he’s looked down as not belonging to the country, which the BJP wants to turn into Hindu Rashtra. One must hear Ribeiro’s sane voice in the midst of the cacophony of noises that try to drown out the sober ones. An end must be put to political tribalism.
